


Out of the frying pan and into the fire

by arofutaba



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Author is trans, Bisexual Female Character, Everyone is Trans, F/M, It/Its Pronouns For Michael | The Distortion (The Magnus Archives), Sasha becomes the Distortion, Sasha kicks Michael out of his own house, Spiral Avatar Sasha James, The shipping isn't the main focus of the fic, but it/its used mostly for consistency, gender..., he/it michael
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-17 02:15:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28592349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arofutaba/pseuds/arofutaba
Summary: Michael just wants Sasha James to be safe. She's worth so much more than this job, and it just wants to save her.Sasha, for her part, never shied away from danger. When Michael saves her from the NotThem and decides the safest place for her is the depths of its hallways, she decides she needs to find her own way out.(A Distortion!Sasha fic. Major CWs for unhealthy friendships, possessive behavior, loss of autonomy, unreality, gaslighting, and well-meaning monsters who take things a step too far. Does not cast Michael in the most flattering light, but its motives are sympathetic)Main fic is only one chapter, but I might add more one-shots from this universe as additional chapters. They won't have a set plot, so I'm open to suggestions!
Relationships: Sasha James & Michael | The Distortion, Sasha James/Tim Stoker
Kudos: 7





	1. Becoming

Sasha had been staring down the fiend in Artifact Storage. She had been terrified, trying to keep the tremor out of her voice as she stared it down - I see you. - but she knew, with a certainty that settled on her in that final moment, that she was going to die. She was going to die here, and nobody would remember her, and all would be lost. It was almost completely dark, the jagged silhouette of the thing looming over her with no other discernible features, and then it was descending on her like a vulture, ready to tear her apart, make her its own-

And then, just as soon as she had resigned to taking her last breath, a garish light flooded the room from behind her, throwing the fiend into harsh relief as something hooked around her and yanked her back. She felt herself be pulled from the chilly gloom of Artifact Storage to somewhere bright and not quite warm, but devoid of temperature at all. A door closed in front of her, mere seconds before the fiend collided with it, and she could still hear it scrabbling at the door as she caught her breath. It was only then that Sasha realised that she had crossed a threshold, and screamed as she looked down. Hooked around her waist was a monstrous hand, one she had seen once before, and as she whirled around she came face to face with the creature that had called her its friend, once.

“Michael,” Sasha sputtered breathlessly, squinting against the bright light as her eyes adjusted to her new surroundings. It was a hallway, all edges that met at strange angles and frames on the ugly walls. “What did you do?”

Michael stared at her for a long moment. There was something odd in its eyes, and they looked like they would droop off its face cartoonishly if it made itself look any more melancholy. It was sizing her up, finally unwinding its bony fingers from her waist and withdrawing slightly, only to reach out and gently tap her on the nose. “Saved your life,” it answered in a languid tone, “And not a moment too soon.”

“I-...” She caught her breath. It really had saved her life, hadn’t it. “Thank you.” Sasha allowed herself a moment’s relief, but as the adrenaline began to fade, she realised with a sickening lurch that the battle she had fled from still raged on outside. “Wait--...Prentiss, the others,” Sasha stammered, “I have to go back. I told Tim I’d find help-...Can you put me back? To, to the Institute, I need to know if the others made it. Elias said-...And then I…” She trailed off, obvious desperation in her ragged voice. “Can I go back now?”

An uncomfortable pause followed. Michael was giving her that expression again, somewhere between pity and longing, before it spoke. “No. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“What? What-...What do you MEAN, you can’t do that? Wherever we are now, the others are in trouble down in the Archives.”

Michael turned away from her, crossing its arms as it stared down the impossibly long corridor. Its gaze was vacant. “I can save you once,” it began, a faraway note in its melodic voice, “But can make no such guarantees for the future. You are my friend,” it told her, enunciating in the most peculiar way, “And the Archives afford you no mercy. You are disposable to them...this will not be the last time you stumble to your death, if I let you go. No...I think you’re best off here.”

“You…” Sasha was stunned. “No. You’re lying. You can’t just keep me here.” 

Michael was going away. It wasn’t walking, so much as it was simply moving through the bizarre corridor like water, rippling and shifting through space. Sasha chased after it, tried to keep pace with it, but the carpet in front of her lengthened impossibly and she couldn’t gain on it. “Michael, WAIT!” she begged, stumbling as she reached a hand out for it.

“Goodbye for now, Sasha. I’ll see you...soon,” it offered, before turning a corner and vanishing. 

-

Sasha did not know how long she had spent in this impossible place since Michael had abandoned her in that first hallway, because time seemed to stretch infinitely in all directions. She wandered for as long as she could stand it, the harsh light bearing down on her and maddening uniformity even of the geometrically impossible structures wearing down her patience.

Her head throbbed. She had lost count of the doors and mirrors and meaningless rooms she had passed through, despite her valiant efforts to keep track. Her feet ached from the constant walking...or did they? As Sasha rubbed the bridge of her nose, she realised that she could not name precisely where she hurt, or whether she was hot or cold. Hungry or full. Here or there. She wasn’t numb, exactly, but discombobulated - all of her nerves fired in different directions, her senses telling her this, no that. It was so much. She needed to leave. God, she needed to leave.

When her resolve wavered and she grew too frustrated to keep exploring, Sasha would find the closest thing she had to peace. She would slide down the wall and curl up at the junction where the baseboard met the crusty old carpet, pulling her jumper up over her head and blocking out the harsh lights and dizzying shapes. She tried to think, then, to use these moments of respite to formulate an escape...somehow. She didn’t know how, but she had to see her coworkers again. This place frightened her on a much deeper level. The longer she spent here, the more she felt she was coming undone, leaving pieces of herself in the sprawling twists and turns she wasn’t sure how to find again.

-

Michael felt her struggling. Her resolve burned like a nugget of hot coal in its gut, straining against its vast, twisting expanse. It grappled with itself, sometimes, as her wails of desperation echoed off the walls and rang ceaselessly in its ears. It knew the choice it had taken from her. But it also knew that it hated the Archivist, and whoever Jonathan Sims was, if he was anything like Gertrude Robinson, Sasha was safer here with Michael. Sasha was its friend. She would not be a sacrifice. She would not die pointlessly on some fool’s errand like Michael Shelley had. It could keep her here forever, it reasoned. As long as she was safe from the Archivist.

It told her this, one day. It sat beside her as she sobbed into the chunky knit of her jumper, listening to her ramble despairingly about optical illusions and something about a nosebleed, her words slurring together through tears and panic. It just raked its sharp fingertips through her cloud of wavy rust-coloured hair in some imitation of a comforting gesture, and cooed softly that she was safer here, safer where nobody could touch her, could cast her aside like rubbish and wipe their hands clean of her. When she told it she would rather be loved and unsafe than trapped and protected, it bit down a stab of pity and told itself she was simply mistaken.

Sasha was going to fade whether or not it wanted to keep her forever, Michael realised. She was human, and this place gnawed at her mind and digested her regardless of its intentions. Before she had come here, the Eye had no doubt had some small claim over her soul, but she was not changed so much as to be hardy enough to survive an eternity with it. And so, it decided, it would stay with her. Keep her as real as she needed to be, it told itself.

Michael started to appear next to her. On Sasha’s excursions through the hallways, it followed, just a few paces behind. She always knew it was there, but since that first day she had never looked directly at it. It sat beside her when she gave up, sometimes hooking a long arm around her or playing with her hair, sometimes keeping to itself, a silent presence.

One day, it talked to her. It told her, with something close to sorrow in its voice, about Gertrude Robinson. She listened as well as she could, for what even Michael could recognise as a hollow shell of her former self, and when it told her with as much bitterness as it could muster what its Archivist had done, new understanding came to Sasha’s eyes. But she was not grateful like it had expected! It had told her of Gertrude’s cruelty, and she did not thank it for sparing her the same fate. She did not profess understanding to it. How could she not? She was an archival assistant like Michael Shelley had been, and yet she did not appreciate it sparing her from whatever Jonathan Sims had planned for her?

Maybe Michael knew its own irrationality. Maybe it knew, deep down, its own brand of cruelty had blossomed from a wound of deep betrayal. Maybe it knew that it was killing her and the only thing it cared about was itself. And yet she was so much like it had been, once. Curious and eager to please. Lively, and inflated with hubris. Just begging to be used and cast aside. It would not let that happen.

One day, when Sasha had nearly forgotten her own name, she told it in a haze of delirium that she wanted to see the sun again. And so it manifested a wide window in the side of its hallways and pulled her to her feet, displaying the bustling streets of London far below. It did not understand when Sasha pounded her fists on the cruelly thick glass and cursed Michael’s name, her hands still wet with tears that left smears on the window’s smooth surface. 

“I don’t understand,” Michael murmured, gesturing to the window with a grand swoop of its arm. “Look, there’s the Institute down there, and it’s so clear out.” 

“It’s not the same,” Sasha sniffled in defeat, and leaned against the glass all the same, staring at the warmth she could not feel, the bustle of traffic she could not hear. 

“Does it help?” Michael asked, vague anxiety bubbling up in it. It did not know how to keep a human alive. It did not know how to save a human mind from decaying in this place, fading into nothing as the madness crept up and around it. 

“...Yeah,” Sasha answered, hugging herself as Michael wrapped around her like a snake in an attempt to comfort her. “But not in a good way. It hurts,” she muttered, birds flying by as she tried to capture the sight of the city skyline in her mind in case it was the last time she’d ever see it, “But it reminds me there’s something outside.”

This was twisted. Sasha knew it, and so did Michael. Guilt stabbed at it. Made it sloppy. Sasha’s fear was not as sharp as it had been once, steadily giving way to resignation and despair no matter how hard Michael tried to keep her spirits up. It had to start taking other victims again, something it had not needed for weeks after Sasha’s initial confinement. None had ever lasted as long as Sasha James, none that were as human as she was. It wondered if a fate at the hands of the Archivist would be better or worse than this...but she was its friend. She would not die on an Archivist’s terms. It would keep her alive, it resolved, and she resolved to quiet her protests, to wait for some slim, possibly futile chance of escape.

-

In time, though her memory grew increasingly unreliable and patchy and her thought process morphed into something roundabout and riddled with tangents and contradictions, Sasha became more accustomed to the mockery of ‘life’ she lived as the Distortion’s captive. She could handle the impossible turns, the bizarre furniture, the sight of Michael’s distorted form incongruously matched with its round, eager face. What was harder to reconcile was its fondness for her, on top of its insurmountable cruelty. She doubted if it truly was cruel at all - it only wanted to protect her from meeting its same fate - but it was hurting her, pulling her apart bit by bit. She felt her perception of reality begin to slough away, or perhaps just morph into something new, and it hurt. It hurt so much sometimes she considered giving up, letting this place dissolve her. Being unmade, and consumed.

She never was, though. Whether it was the desperate memory of Tim’s smiling face she conjured to mind, or another one of Michael’s attempts to pull her head above water and establish some link to the human world she had once inhabited, every time she crept up on the thought of peaceful oblivion, she was pulled back from the brink to resume her indefinite captivity, safe from the destructive potential of one Jonathan Sims, who she had once considered a good friend. Who she missed as bitterly as anything else. Who Michael saw as a stain, a threat, a danger to the only thing it thought worth protecting. Sasha, or maybe just a blank slate to project onto and grieve its young, doomed, tragically human self.

-

Eventually, it came to pass that Sasha was not the only person that Michael had confided in. Its origins were, by her observations, the only thing that truly hurt it, emotionally, could cause it ‘pain’ according to the human conception of such. In time, she had become familiar with the way the hallways functioned as a living, breathing core of Michael’s existence. She knew how they reflected the volatile state of their face and voice. 

And so it should come as no surprise that Sasha knew exactly the moment when Michael finally, finally shifted its focus from her endless torment, to its own. She no longer hoped for true release. She was so broken and bent out of shape now that even if she had found a door, she would have not fit in the world beyond it now. And when she realised that Michael was going to exact its ultimate desire, to kill the Archivist, she was conflicted. Would it free her then? At the cost of Jon’s life? Or would it be for nothing, would it keep her anyway because there would be another some day?

No. She could not let Jon die just for a small chance of freedom. With the last ounce of conviction left in her heart, Sasha accepted a grim truth. She would have to stop Michael at any cost, and she knew exactly how.

-

Michael had been wrong. She shared in its pain of being unmade and reshaped, and her own Becoming. The pain didn’t even hold a candle to the rapturous joy of becoming - or was it simply final release from the powerlessness that had haunted her in captivity? Sasha James was torn asunder all at once, an overdue release for a needlessly tormented soul, and then only Sasha remained. Michael’s scream still rang in her ears as she stepped through her door, shaky and uncertain on her feet as though a newborn fawn, just testing out the way her limbs bent and shifted.

“Jon,” was the first thing she said, her own voice reedy and heavy with a high pitched, digital whine on her tongue. 

Jon, for his part, only stared in shock. “Sasha,” he sputtered. “But you’re dead. You-...No, you died, the worms...no body…” He trailed off. “Are you real? Are you going to kill me?”

Sasha found her words. “No. To...all of the above,” she answered with a shaky breath. She wasn’t real, was she? “That was...Michael. Not me. I’m not...Michael. I don’t know if I’m really Sasha, either. But you need a door,” she said, and it sounded as natural from her mouth as anything in the world. Her door. Hers. Jon reluctantly stepped through, and she showed him home. And then she stepped out into the sunlight, and it didn’t feel as warm or comforting on her new skin-that-wasn’t, and Jon looked so much more thin and haggard since Sasha James had seen him, but this was some sort of freedom nonetheless.

-

Elias had a brief squabble at the front entrance regarding Sasha’s employment - “Really, Ms. James, we have no need of your services anymore, after your ordeal surely you’re ready to move on to greener pastures, truly,” - as he tried to get her out of his hair in the most professionally insufferable ways possible, and she responded to this by playing as oblivious as possible and talking her way into unofficial Institute reemployment almost immediately.

She was here to stay. And she was going to cause so many problems.

Sasha gave Jon her statement. The Spiral suffused through her being screamed in protest at the prospect of fixing herself directly under the penetrating gaze of Beholding, but after Michael had tortured her for so long out of such blatant disdain for Jonathan Sims, she felt she owed him the favor. The scraps of Sasha James sewn into her consciousness wanted to weep as she explained the confinement, the loneliness, the pain, but all Sasha did was laugh. It hurt, it had never stopped, but she wasn’t sure how to express any of it anymore.

-

Tim, for his part, was equal parts livid, suspicious, and overjoyed. It was strange, how he managed to keep her at an arm’s length and wind up attached at the hip at the same time. It was like his optimism was cautious...he had been deeply wounded by the alteration of his loved ones, and it didn’t take a genius to see that Sasha had changed. But at the same time, he wanted to believe this was her, his Sasha, his everything, more than anything in the world. He wondered if that belief would be his undoing. He wondered if he cared.

Sasha stood in her own doorframe, leaning on the sleek yellow wood. She looked nearly the same. She always tried to look the same for Tim. Her eyes were a little wild and her joints bent just a bit too oddly, but her soft hands hid their horrible truth and, if he did not know what lay beneath, he would be tempted to hold them just to feel her warmth again. The two were in his flat, a small, budget dwelling with a cramped kitchen and no real privacy. Sasha had parked her doorway incongruously in front of his hall closet, staring at him without saying a word, as if daring him to speak first.

So he did. They had spoken at the Institute, but in the chaos of the group he hadn’t managed to process the idea of Sasha, his Sasha, coming back to him. She knew now that after her body had never been found in the aftermath of the attack, she was known to be MIA and the prevailing theory had been that the worms had simply left no trace when they devoured her. She had inquired about the creature she had seen in artifact storage, explaining to the group what it did, but nobody had seen it since to their knowledge. And this was where Tim, always full of sunshine, decided to pick up the conversation. “...How do I know you’re her,” he asked after minutes of deliberation. His voice was quiet, but scornful. “You just...came back, coming out of doors, and...talking about Michael, and ‘becoming’, and I don’t get it. Sash, you know why this is hard for me.”

“Okay,” Sasha answered, puffing out her cheeks as she tried to figure out how to explain this to Tim without being hated. Without being distrusted and unwanted by the only person she had once been willing to do anything to see. “Don’t think of it like I’ve been...transformed, or replaced, or somehow altered. Think of it like-- Jon is growing into his role as Head Archivist. I’m sure you’ve seen it, right?”

“Yeah, he’s twice the prick he used to be.”

“That’s the spirit! Imagine it’s like that - I’ve been promoted to a new job, with new transgender monster kissing appeal - except instead of somebody else deciding that for me, I just pushed the last guy off a cliff and took its job out of spite.”

“You joke, but Jon went through a phase where he was convinced one of us killed you AND Gertrude. Oh, and Martin found Gertrude’s body in the tunnels the day you went missing, and everyone thought Jon did it for the position but Jon thought everyone ELSE maybe did it, and oh my god it was a mess without you-”

Tim went on, explaining all of the batshit drama the archives had endured in Sasha’s absence. She tried to forget her worries for now. Forget worrying about what it meant to be the Distortion. Remember what it meant to be Sasha, at least, free for now.


	2. The being formerly known as Sasha James

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My first additional chapter request was the actual statement Sasha gave Jon, from her point of view, so here it is!

“Jon,” Sasha furrowed her brow, looking at him long and hard. “Are you sure you want to hear this now?” After so long in the captivity of the Circus, Jon looked haunted, his face tired and careworn. “You should get some rest,” she murmured, trying to quiet her nerves.

Her fingers danced ceaselessly on the desk, click-click-clicking as they left little indents on the surface of the smooth wood.

“Yes. It’ll be fine,” Jon assured her, stammering when he met her disbelieving gaze. “That is, I promise I’ll get some rest when we’re done here.” There was an uncomfortably long pause, Sasha quirking her brow so high into the air it almost literally leapt off her forehead. She screwed up her face in concentration, making a concerted effort to appear at least visually comprehensible. “...I need to know what happened to you,” he explained. “We thought you were dead.”

“I am.” Sasha folded her hands in her lap, looked around the cramped office, tried to feel at home. 

“But you’re here.” 

“I am.” The atmosphere had grown oppressively tense. Neither of them spoke for a long, heavy moment as Jon was lost in thought, trying to parse the being that sat in the desk opposite him. Sasha cleared her throat, breaking the silence. “So. Do you want my statement, or not?”

“I…” Jon hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. Yes, I suppose that would be the next step, wouldn’t it?” He glanced at the tape recorder, already whirring softly on his desk, and sighed.

“Statement of Sasha James-”

She cut him off. “Sasha. Just...Sasha.” 

Jon peered at her curiously for another drawn out pause, then conceded. “Statement of...Sasha...regarding…?”

“A period of time trapped in a hallway,” she began, “And a transfer of power.”

Jon hesitated. “...Recorded direct from subject, 2nd of June, 2017. Statement begins.”

There was a pause. Sasha had half a mind to run, to disappear through a door, to do anything to escape from the sudden, oppressive feeling of being watched. She was not made for this. She did not belong here. But she owed him. She owed him an explanation, after everything Michael had done to hurt the both of them. Though she did not need to breathe, she exhaled shakily anyway.

“It was after I split off from Tim and brushed paths with Elias that I fled into Artifact Storage. I hadn’t meant to go there - I worked there, once. I know the sort of things that call that place home. Trust me, when I say that if the situation had been any less desperate, I would have never considered that place safety. But I found myself there anyway. I had the recorder going, and I was trying to narrate what was happening to sooth my nerves...or as evidence. In case...something happened to me. I found the table you mentioned, though. It was strange, like...well, like it’s described in the statements. All...swirling towards a center, like you said. I was so caught up in staring at it, that I only noticed I wasn’t alone when it would have been too late.”

“I heard movement in the shelves, and it was too dark to see properly, but there was something moving in the shadows, just passing through what little light there was and playing tricks on my mind. I remember my blood turned cold. I realised that I had made a big mistake, and I tried to calculate my escape, but then it was right in front of me, looming, and it looked all wrong, Jon. It was all thin and dark, like charcoal and ash. I stood my ground...I don’t know what else I would have done...And I told it that I could see it, tried to scare it away, because I didn’t want to die cowering. It was going to grab me, and I could almost see the outline of my own hands...pixellating, like I was going to fizzle away under its towering mass, and I had just about accepted I was going to draw my last breath. I was about to die. And then...I wasn’t. There was a creak from behind me, and the room flooded with yellow light. I saw the thing that was about to take me in stark detail for a second, and then...A hand, one that was peach toned and still too spindly, but not charcoal grey, wrapped around my waist. It pulled me back as I stared forward in shock, and saw the dingy floor of Artifact Storage neatly give way to a carpeted threshold. The door closed in front of me, and I heard the thing from Artifact Storage scraping at the wood, throwing itself at the door in one last attempt to unmake me, but I knew it couldn’t reach me.”

“I just...stared for a second, trying to process what had happened, but then I looked around and felt a new, different sort of fear. I didn’t recognise my surroundings anymore. I was in a long, garishly lit hallway. It was bright, and my eyes had trouble adjusting after the gloom of the Institute. The floor was thickly carpeted with a stained rug, and the path stretched endlessly in both directions. I saw mirrors on the walls, and paintings, both of the hallway and of bizarre, sort of...misplaced looking objects. I turned around, then, and I did recognise Michael. It was sort of a relief, seeing a familiar face after everything that had just happened. I didn’t know how it worked yet, though, or where I was, or what it had done with me. So I asked it what it did, and it told me that it had saved my life.”

“I already knew that, in a way. I was thankful. But then my mind went back to you, and Martin, and Tim,” her voice caught for a second, cracking with emotion, but she continued, “And the worms, and how you lot were still stuck back here. I told Michael that I was grateful, but that I really needed to get back to the others and get more help, because the only person I knew for sure to be looking out for you was Elias, and from the way he had talked about it, I wasn’t sure it’d be enough to save you. But...Michael didn’t let me go. It told me that I was safer in the hallways, something about...how it couldn’t be sure it’d be there next time I was in danger. I was sure it only meant it would keep me until the worms were all gone, one way or another. I tried to stop it and ask for clarification, but it was already leaving. It moved so strangely, you know? Like it was just a part of the space we were in, and phased through the hallways as it pleased. I suppose that is how it works, now that I know what I do.”

“...And then I was alone. It stalked off, disappeared, and left me by myself in that endless corridor. I didn’t understand the gravity of the situation at the time, didn’t know exactly what it meant to exist there. I didn’t know I was being eaten alive, not yet. It hurt my head to try and parse my surroundings, like they were always just a bit...off...and no matter how hard I tried to count the pictures, the doors, the places the path diverged, the nonsensical rooms that served no real purpose...I never saw the same place twice, or at least I don’t think I did. Sometimes a path would be there one moment, and then it wouldn’t, or I’d turn a corner only to turn back and find a dead end behind me.”

“I’m not sure when I started to give up. Time doesn’t exist there, and neither does space, not really. I just know that it all began to hurt. It hurt in some way I couldn’t identify, like just existing started to take more effort than I could muster. My head felt strange, full of lights and colors and packed cotton, and after so long of my senses assaulting me with conflicting images and sensations and sounds, I just...checked out, stopped perceiving anything at all, you know?”

“I think Michael took pity on me. I remember seeing it there sometimes. Sometimes it looked like a man, sometimes it just looked like a concept. It followed me, sometimes. Spoke right in my ear about things I didn’t understand. It let me know of its hatred, its pain. It told me that I was so much like what it had once been, it told me that you were going to hurt me. That you didn’t value my life the way it did. The things it said terrified me, Jon. I just wanted to see you, and Tim, and Martin, and the outside world again. I told it so. I begged it to let me see the world beyond that hideous place. It was conflicted, I think. Hated itself for what it was doing to me, but couldn’t reconcile the idea of letting me go. It told me exactly what it told you. About Gertrude Robinson, what she had done to it. About how being an archival assistant would only lead to misery and loss. It told me I was worth more than that. I don’t know how a slow death in a hell of Michael’s own creation was better than this, Jon. It wouldn’t listen. I think its pain blinded it.”

Sasha wanted to stop. She didn’t want to keep going, to explain how it felt to rip Michael and herself apart and reform it in a different shape than before. But she had already started, and Jon’s gaze bored into her with rapt fascination. “...I decided to stop begging, you know. Keep my pain to myself and focus on strategy. Finding a way out. I resolved to try every trick in the book, you know, as I observed and tried to learn how Michael...worked. I don’t know when, or how, I realised the only way out now was to become it, but I did. I knew it deep inside me, in a way that felt as natural as breathing. It would not let me go, not of its own volition, no matter how hard I tried, or how much I cried, or begged. But it settled deep in my bones that I could kill it. I could kill it, force identity upon it in my own image like Gertrude Robinson had sent Michael Shelley to do so long ago. In its eagerness to explain to me why it had hurt me like this, it had also told me its greatest weakness. I just had to wait for a chance.”

No more stalling. This was it. “And the chance came. Because it met you again...It met you, and it was going to kill you, unleash its hatred for the Archives and finish what it had wanted to do for so long. And it was so consumed in its own pain that it forgot about me, the mouse in its trap. Its attention was off of me. And I-...I did it. I put to use all of that time I had spent familiarising myself with its twists and turns, struggling against my failing sanity to uphold my resolve. I found its core, the center of its being where everything was more and less solid, and I forced my way in. I became.”

“It hurt, Jon. I know that Michael spoke to you of becoming, of the nature of change, and transformation of something that is and isn’t. It hurt like my soul tore asunder, like everything I was giving way to everything I am not, and turned me into something that I don’t recognise. But I recognised you, is the thing. When Michael died, torn to scraps and whatever was left absorbed into whatever I am now, and that infernal door spat me out onto the floor of your captors’ station, you were the first thing I saw. I knew everything that Michael had known. Michael Shelley, and the Michael that I had killed. And Sasha James. Sasha James - myself, but not really, but I am - and you were there, and I...saved you. I couldn’t not. You’re the first-...The first friend I’ve seen in months who hasn’t been killing me slowly,” Sasha squeaked, and realised that her face was streaked with technicolor tears, the unnatural steadiness of her voice giving way to terror, “And now we’re here, and I don’t know what to do next, because I can’t assure you that I’m me when I can’t even tell what a ‘me’ is, but I missed...you...and everyone else, and…”

“It’s okay,” Jon murmured, placing a hand on her shoulder that didn’t quite line up right. “Ah-...Statement ends,” he remembered to say after an awkward delay, and glared at the tape recorder when it didn’t click off of its own volition. “It’s okay.”

Sasha took a long, uncomfortable pause to compose herself, reeling. Wispy shapes danced across her skin, something inside of her spooling back up into a comfortable sort of confusing. She hated to be understood, to be peered into and dissected, almost as much as she had hated to wither under the impossible weight of Distortion when she was still human enough to forget.

“...You promised me you’d get some rest now, Jon.” She tried to smile at him, tried to put on that tone she took with her coworkers when they worked too hard, when she was human and lively and sunny and tried to bring levity to the Archives. It came out hollow, drained, wistful.

“I will, Sasha. I will. Promise me you’ll not disappear again?”

Sasha bit her lip. “...Not yet,” she resolved. “With...what I am now...I’m a bit everywhere, I think. But I will explain what I can to the others. Feel free to play this for them, I don’t...really feel like explaining all of that again. And...stay safe, Jon? I’ll be around. Even for the Unknowing. We’ll make it.”

“Thank you, Sasha.”

“Yeah.”


End file.
